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Canadian pot ads? Think beer ads. Then think again: Delacourt

Beer commercials have taught Canadians how to celebrate their weekends — and occasionally, their national identity. So what are we going to learn from ads for marijuana?

Pot will be legal by July 1 next year, but don’t count on an accompanying flurry of patriotic, “Cannabis Day” advertising. Though lots of Canadians may greet this new industry as a point of national pride — a way to lure tourists from abroad, even — it’s looking like the marketing is destined to be modest.

Tobacco regulation as opposed to that of alcholol is likely to be a model for Canada's treatment of cannabis marketing next year, Susan Delacourt writes. (Joe Mahoney / The Canadian Press file photo)

Those in the know are summing up the marketing options as an alcohol-versus-tobacco choice — and prevailing opinion is leaning toward tobacco as the model for cannabis sales.

That was definitely the view of the federal government’s own task force on marijuana legalization, which released its report late in 2016.

“In our view, comprehensive restrictions similar to those created by tobacco regulation offer the best approach,” said the report from the task force chaired by former justice minister and deputy prime minister Anne McLellan.

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This could well mean plain packaging, strict controls over how and where the product is displayed for sale and, of course, no beer-like ads featuring happy Canadians consuming pot with good-looking friends.

The looming new, legal marijuana industry is a big topic of conversation in Ottawa these days. In just the past few weeks, I’ve moderated a couple of public discussions on the subject — one that included McLellan and her vice-chair of the task force, Mark Ware, and another panel discussion this week, specifically dealing with pot-marketing matters.

McLellan said alcohol marketing in Canada has generally been seen to be a failure in public-health terms — that governments only realized in retrospect that they were not as restrictive as they should have been when it came to marketing a dangerous substance.

Beer ads may have told us what is to be Canadian — remember Joe, from the famous Molson rant? — but they also may have been a little more encouraging of alcohol consumption than they should have been. Or so the medical experts say.

So in McLellan’s view (and she is a former health minister, too) there was no question that tobacco, not alcohol, would be a better model for the future of cannabis advertising.

But Canadians apparently can see similarities to tobacco and alcohol when they’re thinking about where legal marijuana will fit in our society, according to Tony Coulson, a vice-president with Environics Research, who appeared at this week’s panel discussion, hosted by iPolitics Live.

Coulson said that some people see pot as comparable to tobacco because both are consumed through smoking. However, if you’re considering the effects of that consumption, cannabis is more like alcohol. People don’t have to think twice about getting behind the wheel of a car after smoking tobacco, after all.

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Many marijuana advocates also argue that since pot isn’t as dangerous to one’s health as tobacco — at least as far as we know right now — that it isn’t fair to subject this substance to the same, strict advertising controls.

They also say that branding and packaging will be a good way to educate Canadians about this whole new product rolling out on the shelves within a year.

McLellan’s task force acknowledged that point, too, suggesting a possible saw-off, in which marijuana producers would be allowed to brand, package and display their wares, but only in carefully controlled sales venues, off limits to youth.

The suggestion came from online consultations, as the task force said in its report: “Allowing in-store advertising for cannabis brands offered a potential compromise: youth would be protected from exposure to mass marketing and advertising, while producers and retailers could still engage and communicate with consumers of cannabis of legal age and in regulated environments.”

Pretty much everyone on this week’s iPolitics panel, which included experts in regulation, consumer advertising and medical marijuana, agreed that a year is not a lot of time to get this new industry in place and time is going to be tight.

Tony Chapman, a specialist in consumer and advertising research, calls this “the biggest product launch we’ve brought to the market in a long time” and says Canada should already be doing small, test-market studies of how things are going to work. “We need some Petri dishes,” Chapman said.

Marketing issues aren’t the only things up in the air as the deadline to “Cannabis Day” is ticking down, soon to be only a year away. But all signs are pointing to pot ads that won’t bear much resemblance to beer commercials, even if Canada’s, new, legal marijuana business makes people feel just as patriotic as a lager or Pilsner.

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